The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Dark Gathering

Keitarō Gentōga is a college freshman who hates ghosts. Unluckily for him, he has a knack for attracting spirits. Two years ago, this connection had led to him receiving a spiritual injury on his right hand, with his friend getting caught in the crossfire. The event caused him to become a shut-in, leaving him with very poor social skills. Fortunately, Keitarō is slowly starting to mingle with society, thanks to the help of his childhood friend, Eiko Hōzuki.

As part of his rehabilitation, Keitarō takes on the part-time job of a private tutor, and his first pupil is none other than Eiko's cousin, Yayoi Hōzuki. Besides being a child prodigy, there is another peculiarity regarding Yayoi—she has a spiritual constitution, just like Keitarō. However, unlike Keitarō, she yearns to encounter spirits, hoping to find the ghost that took her mother away. As Yayoi and Eiko drag Keitarō to haunted spots, his part-time job seems to be straying further and further away from its original purpose.

Dark Gathering is based on Kenichi Kondō's Dark Gathering manga. It streams on HIDIVE on Sundays.

Two specific things about the source manga for Dark Gathering kept me from enjoying it, and both remain in its anime adaptation: Yayoi's eyes creep me out, and the entire story feels very mean. The former is almost certainly the intention; Yayoi is a creepy child, and her appearance helps to drive that home with the remarkably unsubtle skulls in her eyes. But the latter is the real sticking point for me.

Protagonist Keitaro has had upsetting experiences with the supernatural for most of his life, bad enough that he stopped leaving his room for two years. His childhood friend Eiko is fully aware of this, yet she completely disregards his trauma and, throughout the episode, allows him to be bullied by Yayoi with a smile. She only says anything when he (possibly rightly) attempts to discipline Yayoi, at which point Eiko tells him to stop because the poor child lost her parents. She could show Keitaro the same courtesy and respect for his issues. Eiko may well think she's “helping” Keitaro by pushing him, but she needs to knock it off unless she's a licensed therapist.

This pushed my buttons. I have a very low tolerance for this sort of thing, in fiction or real life, which makes this not my favorite episode of The Guide. And that's a shame because if we take my knee-jerk reaction to the characters out, there are some interesting horror elements here. Yayoi takes the “scary little girl” horror trope and dials it up to eleven, not just carting around her creepy stuffed animals and strangling them until they “blackout,” but also storing angry ghosts within them, using them to create her kodoku to distill a vicious supernatural poison. It's probably to take out the creepy monster that stole her mother's soul, but that doesn't make it a less frightening pastime for a third-grader. Meanwhile, the preview mentions that Keitaro has a curse on the hand he keeps gloved. At the same time, Eiko wears two gloves, so that could imply that she's got her own supernatural issues, possibly to help Yayoi, but also possibly causing her to keep throwing Keitaro under the metaphorical bus. Although not spectacular, the horror imagery also does some effective things, and HIDIVE's use of fonts in their subtitles helps.

What I'm getting at here is that this is a decent episode if you don't dislike Eiko and Yayoi as much as I do. The phone booth ghost is appropriately scary (and, in a nice twist on what you'd expect, evil), the stuffed animals at the end are absolutely creepy, and an interesting world is set up. But Eiko and Yayoi are a high barrier to entry, so if mean humor isn't your thing, you may want to leave this off of your list.

My problems with this premiere align closely with my problems with the manga's first volume. It's pretty fun when Dark Gathering is fully mask-off, indulging in horror imagery and foreboding spiritualism. It's boring and awkwardly constructed when it's not pulling out all the stops and pretending to be a more typical Ghost Stories-style spook anthology. I was hoping the addition of color and sound might change that, but if anything, the anime's decisions only increase that gap, leaving me ambivalent about keeping up with it.

On the positive side, there are some genuinely creepy moments. The show has its visual shortcomings, but there are a lot of nice touches and effective scares here. The frantic jerking of Yayoi's stuffed animals – possessed by evil spirits, naturally – combined with the muffled, static-laden audio is perfectly disconcerting. The ending, where it's revealed that our pint-sized ghost hunter is capturing these spirits to destroy each other, brutally ripping apart any weaker ghosts she comes across, is a perfect crescendo to leave off on. I'm also intrigued by the promise that there's more to both Eiko and Keitaro, hinting that neither is as genial or normal as they would have you believe. That's a great hook, and it seriously got me interested in another episode.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of deficiencies here. The show looks flat and lifeless when it's not in full-spook mode. The designs are dated, the colors are flat, and there's a misguided attempt to compensate for that by slapping grainy filters over much of the footage. For as many effective scare shots, there's an equal number of muddled, ineffective sequences marred by weak animation. I was incredibly disappointed by how they rendered the giant ghost womb that abducted Yayoi's mother since that was the absolute coolest imagery in the manga.

The storytelling is also out of whack, throwing in exposition and backstories at awkward places that rob them of their impact or raising questions that the show doesn't seem interested in answering. Yes, there are hints that there's something more behind all our characters, but in the present, it's disorienting how quickly Eiko and Yayoi just rope Keitaro into this ghost-hunting business despite his central trauma. Why is Eiko so chill about her grade-school cousin fighting murderous ghosts with a crowbar in the dead of night? “Missing her mom” isn't a good enough justification for somebody who isn't supposed to know Eiko's real motivation. These are presumably questions we're meant to be asking, but with no attempt to address or handwave them, they feel like contrivances from a story thrown together haphazardly.

So I guess things even out to neutral? The heights of this episode are engrossing, but the lulls are more frequent and far too long. I appreciate what they're going for, and as a horror fan, I'd love for them to succeed, but I don't have confidence in this show yet. Though shout-out to the spooky font HIDIVE used for the ghosts' dialogue. That was a nice touch.

You give me a Scooby Gang, and I give you my attention. That's the one rule I've lived my life by these last thirty-one years, and it hasn't steered me wrong, yet. Granted, we're still a few crew short of a full Mystery Inc here in this first episode of Dark Gathering, but Eiko serves as a fine Daphne, Yayoi is clearly our Scrappy surrogate, and Keitaro is the Scoobiest son of a gun this side of Jabberjaw. I guess that puts us more in the territory of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, which is just fine by me because that's one of the best Scooby joints of all time.

Right, sorry, I got a little distracted, there. Dark Gathering! How is it? Pretty good! I'm always down for a spooky anime, regardless of the time of year, and Dark Gathering has a solid baseline level of spook going for it. It's not scary, obviously—anime rarely are—but it's got those earnest Spirit Halloween vibes that I crave. Little touches like the distorted sounds that Yayoi's captured spirits make are moody as heck, and I always dig it when anime go for the local urban-legend types of haunting, like the jacked-up phone booth that Keitaro gets dragged to during this inaugural mystery. Top all of that off with the promise of far darker and stranger mysteries to come, what with Yayoi's menagerie of haunted-ass stuffed animals, and you've got yourself a good start for a show!

The main downsides would be the production values of the series, which are, you know, fine, but horror depends on consistent atmosphere more than most any other genre, and if the quality of the visuals, direction, or sound design falters even a little bit, the whole illusion is ruined. Dark Gathering is basically operating with no wiggle room whatsoever, which is a shame. I can imagine a version of this show that really sinks its teeth into the audience if only it had a bit more style and flair to spare. Still, I'm on board for at least another week or two, and if the show can keep the spine tingles coming, I think we'll have a reliable little ghost story to follow for the season.

You know, I didn't expect to like Dark Gathering. It's not made for me, after all; I've never enjoyed Insane Clown Posse's music at all beyond laughing at the music video for “Miracles” along with everyone else back in the day. But at the same time, I've long appreciated the community for creating a place where society's outcasts can develop a feeling of belonging.

Wait what? Do you mean this isn't an ICP anime?

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But seriously, Dark Gathering was one of the series that I had little knowledge or expectations for. For the first few minutes, my skepticism borne of watching a lot of mediocre-to-bad anime premieres prevented me from fully engaging with the characters. Haunted boy? Normal-seeming girl? Creepy kid with skull-shaped eyes? Yawn. Okay, the skull-shaped pupils were pretty cool but that wasn't enough; true, there was an aesthetic inherited from the manga, but I didn't feel like the anime version was putting it to full use, with the cheap animation flattening out any distinctive design.

But then they encountered their first spirit, the atmosphere kicked up, the goofiness dropped away, and I realized what Dark Gathering was capable of. Sunday morning in July isn't peak spookiness – especially in the US, where summer doesn't have the association with Ghost Stories it does in Japan – but my skin was crawling by the time the end credits rolled. This isn't the kind of horror that comes with a moral or lesson at the end; it doesn't care about grossing you out or startling you. The aim is to make the familiar feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable, to make it so you might never look at phone booths the same way. I don't always enjoy horror, but when I do, it's all about the creeping atmosphere; jump scares only go so far and gore will make me turn off the TV pretty fast.

Dark Gathering can't compete in terms of production values with some of the big series this year, but fans of horror will be well-served to give this dark horse a chance.

Combining genres is rarely a simple task, especially for those opposed by nature. This is because if you succeed at one, you often fail the other by default. A good example of this is a horror comedy. Generally speaking: if you're laughing, you're not scared, and if you're scared, you're not laughing.

However, there are proven ways to do horror comedy. One is to make the horror aspects—the blood, the violence, the gore—so utterly over-the-top that it becomes funny. Another, and often much harder path, is to find the humor at the point where the two genres collide. Dark Gathering is this type of horror comedy, and this first episode balances both tones perfectly.

Both comedy and horror are built around subverting expectations. For the comedy bits of the show, we get typical, light-hearted setups played straight—but with horror moments serving as the punchlines. Then, on the other side of things, we see standard comedy tropes subtly twisted—becoming horrific in the process.

So, on one hand, we get a cute, deadpan girl nonchalantly strangling her clearly-possessed stuffed animal (comedy). On the other hand, we see the classic childhood friend character's eyes grow dead, and their smile becomes anything but innocent as she watches her friend do something that could end with his death (horror).

Best of all, there are a lot of visual oddities that add to the horror ambiance even in the light-hearted scenes. Eiko is constantly wearing gloves with no explanation as to why. Yayoi's eyes, which, at first, appear to have skulls in them for cute stylistic purposes, are revealed to look that way to those in the world of the story—with each eye having two pupils. This visual sense of unease helps the show switch from comedy to horror and back again without much trouble. To put it frankly, it's fantastic how well it works.

In the end, this is a surprisingly fun first outing with more than a few good laughs and terrifying moments mixed in. Moreover, more than a few mysteries are lurking in the background that set this show up as one that has both monsters-of-the-week and an ongoing plot. Even though horror isn't usually my thing, I'm hooked enough to see where this story goes.